Throughout the discussion which follows, various terms will be used to describe the patient and the several doctors trying to diagnose the patient's condition. As an aid to understanding, the following definitions shall be adhered to:                (1) Diagnosis—The art or act of identifying a disease from its signs or symptoms;        (2) Provider—Same as Physician;        (3) Gatekeeper Physician—The physician that is actually working with the patient, i.e., he/she is the one that orders diagnostic tests for the patient;        (4) Patient/gatekeeper—The working unit formed by the patient and his gatekeeper physician;        (5) Diagnostic Physician—The physician who “reads” the results of a diagnostic modality to obtain a diagnosis of the patient's problem. The primary examples of these would be radiologists and pathologists;        (6) Digital or Electronic Medical Image (EMI)—A digital/electronic medical image is an ordered set of numbers in a computer bulk data file. This ordered set can be reconstructed, through the use of the computer, into an object from which a primary diagnosis could be made. This set can be the representation of a picture, a graph, a diagnostic sound recording or a recording of physician comments, e.g., audio file or ASCII text, etc. For a picture, this set of numbers determines the location of pixels that, when reconstructed on a computer monitor, would form the image. These numbers also determine, for each pixel, gray scale, color, intensity, etc. Any image (e.g. CT, MRI, . . . ) that is by nature in this form or can be put into this form (e.g. x-ray, pathology slide, . . . ) and from which a primary diagnosis can be read by a reconstruction of these numbers (either from a high resolution computer monitor or from a film derived from these numbers, e.g., Polaroid Helios)), is a candidate for this system;        (7) Digital or Electronic Medical Form (EMF)—this is an electronic form which contains the necessary background information on the patient. The fields on this form would include name, etc, and other indicia as discussed below;        (8) Digital or Electronic Medical Record (EMR)—This is the combination of the EMI and the EMF. It should be noted that the general term “image” or “EMI” is primarily employed, since handling of image is of primary importance in both conventional methods and methods according to the present invention; and        (9) Primary Diagnosis—the assessment of some aspect of a patient's medical condition based on evaluation of a diagnostic medical image.        
It will be appreciated that, in terms of services, the EMR corresponds to a work order package which advantageously includes a work order summary (EMF) and a work order (EMI). Alternatively, the EMR can be thought of a Request for Proposal.
The first action a physician generally takes upon meeting a new patient is to try and identify the patient's medical condition or problem. Until the medical problem is identified, the medical problem can not be attacked. There are many diagnostic instrumentalities, sometimes called modalities, to aid the physician in identification of the patient's medical problem. These modalities include X-Ray, EKG, EEG, MRI, CT, NM, PET, blood tests, microscope images, etc. Each of these modalities produces a characteristic “diagnostic medical image.” Often, a diagnostic provider (physician) tries to analyze, or read, the diagnostic medical image as a means of helping the gatekeeper physician arrive at a diagnosis of the patient's problems. The gatekeeper then uses this to determine a course of action. It could be said that “the better the diagnosis the better the health care.”
It will be appreciated that once the image is formed, the actual “reading” by the physician does not require the patient to be present. In actual practice, there are many instances where the diagnostic physician never sees the patient.
The diagnostic health care system is very large and complex, with hundreds of thousands of providers and millions of patients. It will also be readily apparent that the diagnostic health care system is a system filled with inefficiencies and inadequacies. Because of these problems, some of which will be discussed below, both patients and diagnostic physicians suffer.
Moreover, the medical profession, in many areas has not kept pace with and taken advantage of technological improvements, notwithstanding the critical need therefor. For example, storage and retrieval systems for medical image data such as X-ray films, CAT scans, angiograms, tomograms, and MRI studies are commonly antiquated and often employ methods made popular in the 1920s. Image films used by most diagnostic physicians are still displayed on an antiquated light box.
Hospitals usually maintain large “file rooms” to store the patient image data. The X-ray film image data is typically stored in a large brown envelope approximately 14 by 17 inches which is open at one end. These film envelopes can become too bulky to handle and store, especially in a complex situation in which several of these folders are needed. The weight of some film image data can often reach 15 pounds or more. Moreover, it is time consuming to obtain image data from file rooms either due to administrative backlogs, lack of specialized filing personnel, and misfiling of the image data. In addition, due to the numerous responsibilities of multiple attending physicians and multiple treatment sites, image data for a significant number of patients is often misplaced, lost, or at best, difficult to find when needed.
Typically, the physician examines the patient in his/her office after the radiological studies have been made in a hospital or diagnostic facility. These films and the information contained therein are often unavailable at the time of the examination unless duplicate films are ordered. Thus, there is a need for remote access to these image data for rapid patient assessment and therapy recommendation.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,321,520, which is incorporated herein by reference for all purposes, discloses an automated high definition/resolution image storage, retrieval and transmission system for use in hospitals capable of storing, transmitting and displaying medical diagnostic quality images for use with medical X-ray films or the like. As shown in FIG. 1, the system disclosed by the '520 patent includes components for processing the image data from patient imaging to physician usage. FIG. 1 illustrates an automated high definition/resolution image storage, retrieval and transmission system 10 for use with medical X-ray film 12. System 10 includes an image scanning and digitizing means 14 to transform the visual image from the medical X-ray film 12 or other documents into digital data, an image data storage and retrieval means 16 to store and selectively transfer digital data upon request, a telecommunication means 18 to selectively receive digital data from the image data storage and retrieval means 16 for transmission to one of a plurality of remote visual display terminals each indicated as 20 upon request from the respective remote visual display terminal 20 through a corresponding communications network 21 such as a telephone line, satellite link, cable network or local area network such as Ethernet or an ISDN service for conversion to a visual image for display at the remote requesting site.
To improve automation and tracking, a machine readable indicia or label 22 containing key patient information may be used in association with the medical X-ray film 12. As shown, the machine readable indicia or label 22 is affixed to the medical X-ray film 12 prior to scanning by the image scanning and digitizing means 14 to provide file access and identification. Furthermore, digital data from alternate digitized image sources collectively indicated as 24 and file identification may be fed to the image data storage and retrieval means 16 for storage and retrieval. The major or significant processing stages with regard to the image data flow include:
(1) PATIENT RADIOGRAPHY: The patient's body is imaged and a film is exposed as in an X-ray room, MRI or CAT scan lab.
(2) FILM PREPARATION: The film(s) is developed to create a visible image with optical character recognition (OCR) readable patient identification information superimposed thereon.
(3) FILM INTERPRETATION: Commonly, a radiologist drafts an opinion letter for the film(s). This document preferably includes an OCR-readable patient identification label or standard marking area.
(4) IMAGE SCANNING AND DIGITIZING SUBSYSTEM: A scanner subsystem digitizes each patient image film and/or document on a high resolution scanner. This digitized data is transmitted by a local high speed data link to a separate or remote master storage unit. Patient identification information is read from a standard format on each file by OCR techniques and efficiently stored with the digitized image data. Enhanced scanner resolution and gray scale requirements are provided. Furthermore, to reduce data rate processing, data compaction or compression is accomplished within the scanner subsystem.
It should be noted here that in order to back-up possible data link down time or scanner down time, the scanner subsystem may include a CD-ROM data storage device of some description so that image data may continue to be digitized. The CD-ROM disk may then be manually delivered to the file room unit for subsequent use. In addition, the digitized data of one or two images may be written to a compact semiconductor memory card, e.g., a “RAM Card.” This form of data storage may be used to send selected images for special purposes such as when the image data is needed in another remote location for purposes of obtaining a second opinion.
At this point in the image data flow, there is a split in which the original film data is stored as a “master” in a file room and the image disk is made available for active “on-line” use in an image storage and retrieval subsystem.
(5) FILM FILING: The patient image films may be placed in the industry standard 14 by 17 inch brown paper folders and placed on conventional filing shelves. Older films can be tagged and stored off-site to reduce the excessive inventory of films found in many hospital file rooms.
(6) IMAGE STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL SUBSYSTEM: This subsystem is a remotely controllable, automatically accessible image data subsystem to store and automatically retrieve, on-demand, the compressed digital information contained on the CD-ROM disks. The image storage and retrieval subsystem may have a high-speed data link connection to the scanning and digitizing subsystem as well as a write drive recording mechanism which is dedicated to receiving the data from the scanning and digitizing subsystem. This CD write drive can operate without interrupting remote access operations.
Remote access to the image storage and retrieval subsystem may be provided by a variety of telecommunication links. By using several CD disk drives and electronic buffering, virtually simultaneous access can be granted to several or more users. However, the medical image disk will contain relatively huge quantities of data making it impractical to send over conventional data communication links without very efficient data compression technology.
(7) TELECOMMUNICATION SUBSYSTEM: Occasionally circumstances may warrant manually making an extra copy of the patient's image files to be physically delivered to an authorized requester. However, for the system to provide broad service to the health care industry it must be able to efficiently telecommunicate image files to remote locations both cost effectively and within a reasonable time interval.
(8) REMOTE DISPLAY TERMINAL: The quality of the image available to the user is limited or determined by the receiving presentation terminal or monitor. Two specific presentation terminal types can be used, a modified personal computer terminal for use in a physician's office, hospital nurses' station and the like, and a large screen presentation terminal with remote controlled interaction primarily for operating room use. Both terminals have facilities to display the available patient directory of images, and facilities to select an image, and to enhance and zoom in on selected areas of the selected image. Image enhancement has heretofore been impractical for film-based images and thus much subtle but important pathological information has been largely lost. This is especially true of X-ray data. The ability to subtly enhance contrasted tissue areas is considered to be an important feature and benefit of the system.
A high-resolution printer of 600 dots per inch (dpi) or better permits the physician to print out selected images. This is especially valuable when the physician chooses to expand and enhance selected critical image areas since a cost effective printer would otherwise not have adequate gray scale or pixel resolution to give diagnostically useful output.
Each terminal consists of a standard high performance personal computer with one or more data source interfaces such as a RAM card, a CD-ROM disk drive or a data modem, a decompression graphics interface circuit and graphics display. The large screen presentation terminal has a large screen display for easy viewing for a surgeon who may be ten or more feet distant. The large screen presentation terminal also has an optional remote control so that an attending technician or nurse can scroll images, enhance and zoom, at the surgeon's request.
One major flaw with the automated high definition/resolution image storage, retrieval and transmission system described above is that it merely assumes that a skilled diagnostic physician such as a radiologist will be available to read each X-ray film as it is taken. This may not be the case. For that reason, several hospitals may join a Radiology Health Care Network as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,469,353, which reference is also incorporated herein by reference for all purposes.
The Radiology Healthcare Network disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,469,353 provides high quality, timely medical interpretations of radiological images on a national (e.g., across the U.S.) and regional basis. The images can include images created by conventional x-ray technology, computed radiography, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), ultrasound imaging, nuclear medicine, and mammography equipment. The network includes the acquisition of these images from health care facilities, the conversion of these images to digital format, the routing of these converted images, the interpretation of these routed images, and the routing of the interpretations back to the originating facility. The images are routed (e.g., on a variety of high-speed digital and analog telecommunication networks) to the appropriate interpretation resource by an administrative site on the Network based on one or more requirements associated with the medical image study. The interpretation can be performed on high-resolution workstations and/or on films produced by film printers. The Network includes quality control measures which assure high image and interpretation quality. The control and tracking of images by the administrative site results in the production of a complete, signed interpretive report in a timely manner. See FIG. 2.
From the discussion above, it will be recognized that the current medical image distribution technology has the following problems and limitations:
(1) Diagnostic physicians are often restricted to the local geographical vicinity of the patient/gatekeeper who requests the medical image to be made and read. This is particularly true of traditional radiology services, but is also true of existing teleradiology services. As noted in U.S. Pat. No. 5,469,353, the diagnostic physician assigned by the administrator is the one nearest to the point where the medical image was generated. It will be appreciated this is often counterproductive, since the diagnostic physician best able to perform the reading may be on the other side of the country. For example, the victim of a car crash at 6 AM in California can take advantage of a large pool of idle radiologists already at work at 9 AM along the entire east coast.
(2) Local diagnostic providers may not be adequate for the patient's medical needs either for want of competency in a particular area or due to staffing problems, i.e., a competent diagnostic physician is not available when needed. This could result in poor health care and possibly disastrous results for the patient and, legally, for the medical facility.
(3) The patient has no choice in who reads the image once it has been made. In fact, under the current system, i.e., both the traditional and teleradiology systems, there isn't even a way for the patient to know who is available to do his/her reading, or at what price. This isn't even deemed to be relevant information for the patient.
(4) The patient has no voice in determining the fee he/she will pay for the reading. Many of the new heath plans contain provisions such as “medical savings accounts” which encourage patients to spend his/her health care dollar wisely; this is impossible to do when the fee is not known in advance.
(5) The patient has no mechanism through which to barter. For example, there are medical problems that are not time critical, since most medical problems require only reasonable-time readings not real-time readings. Therefore, a patient should be able to use that fact as leverage for negotiating a lower rate for his/her reading. But under current systems there is no mechanism for doing so. Instead, the patient who can wait a day and the patient who can wait a week for their respective readings now end up paying the same fee as that paid by an emergency patient. Moreover, one of the really peculiar things about current health care delivery systems is that the fee paid for a service is often not determined by either the person receiving the care or the person providing the care. Instead, it is determined by some third party such as an insurance company, a managed care organization, or the government.
(6) The patient has little ability to interact with the diagnosing physician; the patient usually can't even find out the status of his/her medial image reading, let alone have any control over how fast his/her image is read. For some people this is more important than for others. But if it is important, this uncertainty can have a strong negative psychological effect. Since it is not unusual for a reading to take a week, it is not unusual that a patient who is prone to worry can waste many hours fixating on his/her medical problem.
(7) The diagnostic physician has almost no control over which patients come to him for readings.
(8) The diagnostic physician can do almost nothing in choosing which patients he/she wants to do readings for. He/she can only take or reject whatever patients are sent to him from a referring gatekeeper or by the central administration of some telemedicine service. The diagnostic physician is at their mercy; he/she has no access to the overall images that need to be read at any given time.
(9) The diagnostic physician has little control over scheduling; his/her routine is determined to a large degree by forces he/she has no control over, e.g., when gatekeepers choose to send him patients, scheduling for the imaging modalities, etc. This leads to 20%-30% down time, most of the down time being of short duration (approximately 15 minutes) and being unpredictable as to when it will occur. This inefficiency leads to major increases in the overall cost of diagnostic health care. Existing diagnostic health care systems, including those employing telemedicine, do not address this issue.
(10) The diagnostic physician has little ability to control his/her fees. The gifted provider could charge more if his/her services were regionally available even though the local market for his/her particular services does not warrant an increase in his/her fees.
(11) Diagnostic physicians, on the whole, have little ability to specialize to the degree that they might like to, since their patient pool isn't large enough, in the local region, to warrant specialization. When there is a desire for increased quality, it should be encouraged at every step. Specialization generally enhances the quality of the diagnostic services provided by the profession. If the size of the patient base could be sufficiently enlarged, e.g., made national in scope, hyper-specialization would not only be possible but cost-effective.
(12) A medical facility has to be staffed based on anticipated peak work loads, which often means that the inevitable fluctuations in patient flow cause either the diagnostic staff to be over loaded or underutilized. Moreover, these fluctuations are unpredictable and often of short duration.
(13) There is no marketplace that brings together all patients and all providers.
(14) As discussed above, a Central Administration decides which diagnostic physicians should read which images. For the large teleradiology groups, where there could be hundreds or thousands of diagnostic physicians, this is untenable. It is similar to the New York Stock Exchange telling people which stocks they should buy. It also creates additional expenses, i.e., middle men.
(15) The system is not effective in alleviating the long term escalation of provider prices. Efforts by third party payers to reduce provider fees are often only temporarily successful; and
(16) Traditional radiology is changing. It has been theorized that the country will soon have only a couple of huge radiology groups. That is, a patient will have no choice but to go to one of these. It will be appreciated that this latter trend could lead to monopolistic practices.
The several different methods for the delivery of diagnostic health care previously discussed all suffer from some or all of the problems listed in items (1)-(16) immediately above.
It is desirable that a remote access medical image exchange system include the following major features:                (1) structures to store and efficiently retrieve image data and automatically identify the data by patient name, image type, date and the like;        (2) communications channels permitting diagnostic physicians to remotely access particular patient image data from the system in near real time;        (3) communications channels to quickly and affordably access image data from the gatekeeper's office;        (4) a combination of hardware and software to enhance the medical images by both contrast enhancement and zooming for improved diagnostics;        (5) software and corresponding hardware permitting the patient/gatekeeper to quickly ascertain the time by which the medical image reading will be completed and, if necessary, reschedule the reading of the medical image;        (6) software and corresponding hardware permitting the patient/gatekeeper to direct the medical image to a particular diagnostic physician of choice; and        (7) software and corresponding hardware permitting the patient/gatekeeper to direct the medical image to a particular diagnostic physician or group of diagnostic physicians having a particular specialty.        
In other words, it is desirable to have a remote access medical image exchange method by which the patient/gatekeeper can set a price for an individual diagnostic service, and by which the diagnostic provider can use price to decide whether to accept the offer.
What is needed is a system and operating method therefor to permit bidding for the unused time of diagnostic physicians by patients who do not need real time medical image diagnosis, and/or to permit diagnostic physicians to bid on available work, and thereby provide an electronic marketplace for diagnostic services. What is also needed is a system and corresponding operating method which permits the patient/gatekeeper to designate a particular diagnostic physician to perform a particular diagnosis. It will be appreciated that these requirements are critical to efforts to increase the quality of health care while limiting the cost of health care delivery services.